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Blog your way to a thriving website

The starting point for many freelance designers is typically a relatively small webpage, maybe 4 or 5 pages. For the sake of this discussion lets keep it simple and say your website has the usual ‘home’, ‘about me’, ‘design portfolio’ and ‘contact me’ pages.

There are hundreds of other graphic design websites out there, and while we would all like ours to be the one that appears at the top of Google and gets the visitor, if you think logically – and honestly – about it, your brand new website isn’t really any better or more deserving of visitors than any of others that are already online.

The content of these sites is usually pretty similar, right down the wording. There is usually a short spiel about you, a list of the design services you provide, and the images which make up your design graphic portfolio. Just like there are on a hundred other sites. Your portfolio might be spectacular, but at this point there isn’t really anything driving people to you website to see it.

Regular blogging can be an excellent means to overcome this and continually increase the number of potential clients that land on your site.

As mentioned above, you can only fit so-much information into a basic website. By publishing individual articles on branding, logo design, colour, printing, stationery, packaging design, typography, and whatever other topics are relevant to you, you’ll create dozens and eventually hundreds of pages of unique, in-depth content which *is* better and more deserving of visitors than the hundreds of other cookie-cutter design websites you were previously lumped in with.

All unique content gets traffic. It may sound daunting to hear you should publish a several hundred articles in order to get work, and it obviously isn’t going to happen overnight, but with a little regular work it comes together faster than you think.

Each article doesn’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winning novel either. To paraphrase a philosophy that was a passed on to me (and to veer a little into SEO here), you don’t need to write an article which will generate a million visits. You just need to cover topics which will generate a few hundred to a thousand visitors per month (Google offers a keyword tool to help you see how competitive certain keywords/phrase are, and how often they’re searched for, to help you decide what to write about).

Over time, as you publish a dozen, then 50, 100, 200 etc. articles, the total of those “few” hundred visits quickly per article add up to more traffic than you could ever possibly hope to gain with your cookie cutter website. Sales is a numbers game, obviously not every visitor will engage your services, but the more relevant traffic you get, the more business you’ll get.